Our University – The Ivory Tower

 

The concept of “the Ivory Tower” is used in a negative sense when referring to universities to indicate a separation from reality and the practical concerns of the world. “Ivory Tower” first appears in the Song of Solomon 7:4, but I believe the reference there is more about the appearance of a women’s neck and its beauty, than the separation and neglect of practicality purportedly resident in universities.  

Another passage, I Kings 22:19 says that King Ahab’s palace, a place of isolation, was “inlaid with ivory”.  This is clearly a pejorative reference to the separation, high-mindedness and distance implied in the modern concept of the university as an Ivory Tower. 

In one more case, the Proctor family, of Proctor and Gamble fame, was a benefactor to Princeton University and provided resources to build a graduate education facility and a dining hall named after William Cooper Proctor.

Guess what they manufactured for the unwashed masses?  Ivory soap.

Where does the expression Ivory Tower originate?  Trying to understand why Southern Illinois is referred to as Little Egypt is equally confusing.  I can cite three stories all of which make sense, all believable and different.  No matter, we know what we mean when we say Little Egypt.

I have a friend known to many of us in Southern Illinois – especially after our recent storms and his tireless reporting on the recovery process – Tom Miller. When discussing a particularly difficult and perplexing subject with me a few years ago, he suggested that one purpose of a university was to be separate and to focused on tough issues and problems. 

Tom suggested that the implication of height was important.  Sometimes, in order to see things clearly you need to get up in the air… survey the whole landscape.  Tom gets it. 

The momentary and fleeting detachment from the pragmatic realities of the day- to-day shuffle allows reflection and study that helps society sort things out.   

That is our job.

I go to a great family physician in Carbondale.  He is in a state of perpetual diagnosis.  I went in one day and, after I had taken my shirt off, ready to be examined, he walked into the exam room. 

He said, “Are you coughing a little?”, “Yes” I replied.   “A dry cough?” “Yup”, was my retort.  “Are your eyes watering?”  “Yes”.  “Do you have a low grade fever?”  I said, “I think so.”  He acted like he was going to write a prescription.  I said, “Wait a minute! Don’t you have to examine me?”  He laughed and said, “The last forty people who came in had exactly the same stuff.” And he examined me. 

He did his job.

He was not an epidemiologist in the true sense of the word, yet he was. This was applied epidemiology.   No theory, just enlightened practice.

When the epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University undertake one of those Ivory tower studies for which the university receives over one billion dollars in federal funding per year – nearly twice that of any other university – they are expected to get up in the ivory tower and take a look around…see what is going on and why. 

 It is Johns Hopkins job.

 And when they do it well, eventually it trickles down to my guy in Carbondale. Our university needs to provide theory, background, and foundation so that those who practice can do so with excellence.

Our University – Graduate School

At this time of the year, it is hard not to reflect on graduate education and its rising importance to many students in colleges and universities.  We send students to some of the best graduate schools in the United States: Columbia, Penn, Rice, Cornell, Virginia Tech, Colorado, Georgia Tech, and Michigan, to name just a few that come to mind.  And this is only from our School of Architecture. 

And it happens all over campus.

One of the measures of success for our university is where our undergraduates go to graduate school.  It demonstrates our students can compete on the international stage and win contests for admission in places where the acceptance rates are often only as high as 10 percent.

I am happy for our students who go to these institutions.  I even find myself recommending them to places that will give yet another view of our profession, challenge students in a new environment, and provide an expanded set of conditions through which to assess their world.

But I cringe at the “trade deficit” that is being created.  These very good schools are taking our best students.  This is good, but we are not getting our share back. 

Graduate schools play a significant role in the reputation of a research university.  They are all there is.  We have excellent undergraduate programs.  The ability of our students to effectively compete for limited spots in the best graduate programs proves that.  In order to move to the next level, our university must improve its graduate programs and eliminate the trade deficit that exits. 

This is accomplished in only one way. 

There is no shortcut, no secret formula, and no silver bullet.  We must seek out and hire the very best faculty who teach with passion because they teach ideas, concepts, approaches, and methods that they have discovered or invented themselves.  They energize students and peers alike, and bring power to the reputation of the university.  The heat comes from teaching, but the fuel for the fire is discovery and research.

This is why our students go to the best universities for graduate study, and in order for our university to address the trade deficit there is no shortcut.

In addition, if the economic impact of a university on a region is measured, the money students and staff spend on food, housing and entertainment is significant, but pales in comparison to the long term sustainable impact of new knowledge on new business and general employment, albeit with a longer gestation period. 

There is never a convenient time to seek and hire the faculty excellence that breeds a strong research reputation.  Sometimes this kind of hiring creates internal strife over salaries.  In order to bring the very best, you may have to break salary scales.  Current faculty members may bristle at a new hire, as yet unproven, who comes in at a rate that is twice the norm. 

There is great risk too because, sometimes, you will bet on a horse that won’t run.

But without that boldness, the university will languish as a research institution.  That does not mean that we cannot “grow our own”, but sometimes the seed corn for that growth must be imported and developed with determination.  The importance of this strategy to increase the quality of our university cannot be overstated. 

And this focus on research and graduate education creates enviable problems of burgeoning enrollment at all levels because people relentlessly seek out quality.

Our University – The Power of the Hire

 

I recently had the opportunity to attend a reception in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Arts.  It was an alumni event to celebrate the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller.  Fuller was a remarkable man by any university measure.  A free thinker:  a futurist with a challenging mind, a non conformist, an ideologue but only for his own ideas, a leader, not a follower.  

Just the kind of person you want at a university.

There are a series of photographs on the wall behind our reception area in the School of Architecture related to Fuller’s ideas and projects: a dome over Manhattan, the Dymaxion car, and a Dymaxion house that looks like a tea kettle, innovative certainly, but a place to call home for nobody but the Tetleys.

One of the images on the wall is of Delyte Morris and Fuller striding across the campus, Fuller with his face to the breeze and Morris with a package of stuff under his arm.  They were on a mission.

Both wanted to change the world.  Fuller wanted to treat it like a great big machine with an operating manual.  Morris wanted to provide educational opportunity to the people of our region, state, nation, and world.  Both, men of substance with big ideas.

Vision.

They needed each other.  Fuller needed a big thinking president who did not sweat the small stuff and saw the university as a market place for ideas.  Morris needed big thinking faculty members who were not afraid to ruffle a few feathers and stand up for something that was not the status quo.  Clark Kerr, the greatest university system leader of the twentieth century, said that the only thing that would get a majority vote from the faculty on a university campus was the status quo.  He understood how these places worked.

I don’t think Fuller felt the need to please everyone he met when he came to visit.  The idiosyncratic thinker and the university leader knew the power of the hire.

They understood that to make a place like our university really work, good hires had to be made.  Good hires are risky.  Good hires don’t always satisfy a committee.  Good hires often look best in hindsight.

It is difficult to find someone associated with our university that would ever suggest that Fuller was a bad hire.  I have met people who remember the era well… that hire and a number of others were controversial.

All places of commerce, and the university must be a place of the commerce of ideas, need to make good hires.  It is unfortunate that, too frequently, good hires are risky.  They stretch the organization and challenge it to its core.   

Our alumni in Chicago are proud of our university for many reasons and act as if hiring Fuller was the most natural thing in the world.  They may feel he would have easily been hired at any number of universities.

But he wasn’t.

He was hired because our university leader had the presence of mind, the confidence of experience, to take a risk and hire someone who might challenge the way we think.  Morris and Fuller wanted to change the world.

No greater testimony exists in confirming the power of the hire.  Bill Gates demonstrated his knowledge of it. 

“The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.” 

Our University – ACT

 

For many, these three letters may spell something that happens in front of an audience or television camera.  For millions of high school graduates seeking entrance at a university of their choice, they are the bane of their existence in the brief interlude between high school and the rest of life.

 The ACT and the SAT – these are letters without names anymore because the idea of achievement and aptitude in and of themselves are seen as negative by many university leaders.  They were created as a way to level the playing field in college admissions with data, rather than social status.  The founders believed equal access to college would provide, through unfettered opportunity, a better world.  James Conant, a President at Harvard during the thirties was a strong proponent of this new view of merit-based admissions.

 Fast forward to 2009.  In the early twenty-first century, many want to level the playing field in college admissions with something other than data.   The value of standardized testing is being diminished. Now college presidents claim that the very thing that Conant and others thought was leveling the field, actually creates unfair advantage.  Wake Forrest and other universities say they cannot achieve a healthy, diverse student body with socially biased ACT or SAT tests.

People who live in large houses perform better on them. People who live in affluent suburbs perform better on them.

If you ranked all ZIP codes in the nation by mean family income – this is easy as J. C. Penney and L.L. Bean already do this to decide where to send catalogs – and listed the ACT takers side by side, nearly perfect correlation would exist.  People who come from “privilege” do better on these tests than those who don’t.  They also drive better cars, wear genuine leather, and rarely buy knock-off bags and watches on street corners.

These tests all create exclusivity, the same kind that makes a high school half-back who runs a 4.3 second 40 yard dash more valuable on a football field than one who runs a 4.9 second 40 yard dash.  Speed is a form of merit, just like the ability to score well on a standardized college entrance test. 

In both cases there is the presence of a more or less objective measure. 

There are some half-backs who might be a bit slower and actually be better football players. Likewise there are some entrance examination test takers who might score a little lower but still make an excellent contribution.

The student with the 34 on the ACT and a 4.3 in the forty makes both admission officers and football coaches salivate. Not one or the other in this kid’s case, but a wholehearted effort to bring them in at any cost, no matter the socio-economic status or zip code.

The admission officers need to always look at a combination of indicators to determine fitness for study.  The ACT, class rank, high school GPA, courses taken, activities participated in, creating a flexible formula of sorts, will give a pretty good indication of potential success in the university. 

No university president or admissions office can argue that.  History denies them the ability to do so.

If the current disaffection with standardized tests for their bias leads to throwing away other measures of potential in college admissions, American higher education is in very deep trouble. 

The exclusivity of one indicator is wrong, but throwing all objective measure is tragic.

If you do not perform well on standardized tests here is a suggestion, one that I took myself. 

Go to a community college, take demanding courses, and prepare for the university.  If you perform, you will get accepted to a university or find a good career that brings you satisfaction based on strong performance and ability; you will have succeeded.

You, your work… bias-free.

Our University: Moral, Ethical and Legal Decision Making

 

In the study of architecture at any university there are always a few courses on professional practice.  They are required by accrediting agencies, but that burden is of little consequence.   Practitioners want the discipline to flourish; therefore standards of behavior that meet a generally accepted level of propriety are essential. 

Moral, ethical, and legal considerations form the basis of guided professional judgment.  This is a means of self-preservation.  People are smart and will eventually not go to professionals who do not hold high standards of behavior if they have a choice.

In the season of graduation, reflecting on the primary purposes of study is always useful.  The educational process is incomplete if moral, ethical and legal forces are left to chance.  Professionals who are licensed, regulated, or selected by the state or its constituents to ply their craft, are obligated to this tripartite constellation of decision making.  Neglect leaves us short of our aspirations.

We see the impact of such neglect daily in public and private life in service, commerce, and family.

Moral behavior is defined by a code of acceptable conduct.  That code is derived from social standards and laws that are given birth by belief systems held by the people who make up a society.  Traditionally, belief systems evolve from private to public life and have as their genetic code religious or faith practices and values. 

Find an adage that most people accept and you can, almost without exception, trace it back to a biblical principle.  In other non-western societies different foundational tenets will guide.   Many treatises show strong similarity of acceptable day-to-day behaviors in all societies. 

Ninety-nine percent of the time the Golden Rule rules, no matter where you live.

Ethical behavior is similar to moral behavior but defined more strongly by the interactions of various personal belief systems, and codified into appropriate behavior by the larger social group.

Legal behavior, the lowest form of guidance for our actions, is defined by men and women arguing various manifestations of moral and ethical action, and codifying them into laws which then guide the community, not from deeply held personal convictions, but publicly agreed upon canon and rule.

In a word, laws.

The challenge in this thinking for architecture students is that, while a particular action might be legal, it could also be morally or ethically unacceptable.  Even judges and attorneys retreat into a safe place by suggesting that a decision that does not feel “right” is guided by the simple premise that “It is the law.”  Public officials are sometimes seen running to this same safe haven. 

This is not to suggest that the legal barometer is unimportant; it is foundational and binds a society together, but it is simultaneously low as a standard of decision-making.  Conscience is high, harder to come to grips with, and absolutely worthy of our day-to-day consideration and reflection. 

The law is simple and direct.  It is the head not the heart.  Morality is the highest form of guidance for decisions.  Ethics is the bridge between the two.

Our students should become professionals who know the law and accept it as a yardstick for professional decision making, but more importantly, they should live by moral and ethical standards that are the precepts upon which the law rests.

The three lenses of moral, ethical, and legal behavior are powerful in every aspect of society, and should hold a preeminent place in our heads and hearts at our university.